Mai Ling Festival: Spring Stretch

Opening: 12 May 19:00
Exhibition: 16 – 31 May (Thursday – Saturday, 3 – 7 pm)
*The exhibition is closed on 14 and 15 May.

For Mai Ling’s third and final program in the series Becoming Stickiness: Protocols for Survival, the festival Spring Stretch dives into spring and its transformative and regenerative energy through an exhibition and a series of workshops, performances, talks, reading sessions, interventions, and gatherings. Extending Mai Ling’s rhizomatic relations of friendships, kinships, and alliances, it honours plural relations and practices of collective resilience and survival.

The programme brings together works and practices that reflect on the complexities of language, memory, labor, and belongings that have been shaped by diasporic, migratory lived experiences and various means of knowledge transfer. Some works engage with traditional and indigenous techniques as well as mythology as a medium for storytelling, sharing, and dreaming. Others invite us to listen gently to the surrounding landscapes that nurture multispecies entanglement, collectively imagining agroecological futures. Further, the festival explores dispersed histories of displacement, marginalized ghostly matters, as well as in-between states of life and death, while attending to fragility, resilience, and transformation. It also touches upon representations of gendered and colonial violence, while calling for a collective effort to resist and stick together.

Spring Stretch is accompanied by Mai Ling’s ever-transforming mobile kitchen, which acts as a platform for gatherings, imagining communal cooking, collective public eating, and cultural memories around them.

Over the course of three weeks of May at 8B®1 in the 15th district, we will be learning from and with artists, researchers, practitioners, makers, writers, and community members whose practices embody and enact sprouting, rooting, and futuring, across generations and geographies.

With: Leonardiansyah Allenda, Ivanka Custodio and Judy Fugoso, Linda Jiayun Gao-Lenders, Tang Han, Marcos Kueh, Jessica J. Lee, Yen Noh, So Young Park, Ziliä Qansurá, SAE Greenhouse, Shireen Seno, He Shen and Chanyoung Park, and Tofu Stand

Program
SPRING STRETCH WEEK ONE 12-17 MAY
Tuesday, 12 May
19:00 Festival Opening & Words from Mai Ling

19:15 Performance “IN BETWEEN SEANCES” by Yen Noh
Yen Noh traces the ways in which linguistic and literary practices fracture and reassemble language. Instigated by marginalized histories of intimate violence, her work explores how language—in its most encompassing sense—is warped and stranded in the experience of dispossession, and in so doing, participates in the affective strategies for survival and refusal.

Wednesday, 13 May
16:00 – 19:00 Collective Carpet Making Workshop by Ziliä Qansurá
Ziliä Qansurá (b. Bashqortostan) is a Vienna-based artist working across theatre, performance, installation, and textiles. She moves between contexts, connecting them through materials and developing her artistic identity through transformation and storytelling, refusing to be categorized.

Saturday, 16 May
13:00 – 14:30 Reading Group with SAE Greenhouse together, we read….
SAE Greenhouse Art‑Lab is a space of experimentation at the intersection of food, art, and agroecology. Since 2022, arvae and the SAE have collaborated to host art–science exchanges including dinner series, residencies, reading sessions, film screenings, collage workshops, zine‑making, fermenting sessions, exhibitions, symposia, and student seminars.

15:00 – 19:00 Workshop “Itinerary of Collaboration” by He Shen and Chanyoung Park
This workshop begins from an evolving itinerary of collaboration that evokes relations, connections, and inspirations, shared among Chanyoung, Shen, and many others—sometimes prompted by cooking tofu, at other times by accents and spoken words. We ask how our entangled trajectories might become a creative resource that nurtures plural futurities.

Sunday, 17 May
14:00 – 16:00 Talk by Jessica J. Lee
Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author, environmental historian, and author of three books of nature writing, Turning, Two Trees Make a Forest, and Dispersals, the children’s book A Garden Called Home, and co-editor of the essay collection Dog Hearted.

SPRING STRETCH WEEK TWO 22 & 24 MAY
Friday, 22 May
19:00 – 20:00 Meeting point: 8BR1 “notes of a sleepless cicada” Soundwalk by Linda Jiayun Gao-Lenders
Linda Jiayun Gao-Lenders (*1995), they/them is a Chinese German performance maker and sound artist. Their practice is based in artistic research, collaborative works, Tai Chi and writing with an interest in (post-)socialist memories and the relation between the documentary and the poetic. They are a founding member of footnotes collective which explores public space as a site of collective imagination and intervention. As part of the queer synthesizer collective sad sinʞ society they produce ambient/drone/noise soundscapes for film and performance.

Sunday, 24 May
14:00 – 15:00 Artist Talk by Marcos Kueh
Marcos Kueh (b. 1995, Sarawak) is a textile artist who has a background in graphic design and advertising, currently living and working in the Netherlands. Growing up in a post-colonial developing country, Kueh has long been engaged with questions of identity and how Malaysia is perceived — whether through colonial depictions in museums or stylised narratives in tourism advertising.

15:30 – 17:30 Screenings by Mai Ling Picks
Tang Han, “Miss Ginkgo: Chapter 1” (2021)
Tang Han, “Miss Ginkgo: Chapter 2” (2022)
Tang Han, “Ginkgo and Other Times” (2023)
Shireen Seno, “To Pick a Flower” (2021)

Tang Han is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Berlin. She works across film, video, and installation. Through storytelling, her practice delves into the micro-intricacies of everyday life and the natural world, exploring questions of representation and meaning while shedding light on the interplay between the seen and the spoken across diverse cultural contexts.

Shireen Seno is an artist and filmmaker whose work addresses memory, history, and image-making, often in relation to the idea of home. A recipient of the 2022 Film Fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin program and 2023 Visiting Professor for ArteVisione at c/o in Milan. As a duo, John Torres and Shireen Seno are the recipients of the 2025 Han Nefkens Foundation, Mori Art Museum, M+ and Singapore Art Museum – Moving Image Commission.

Festival program week 3 will be announced soon!